Ripple Signs Robinhood, BNY and C2FO in One Day as RLUSD Moves Into Brokerage, Custody and Trade Finance
Ripple used its Swell conference in New York on Tuesday to announce three partnerships at once. A retail broker, a custody bank and a trade finance platform. Each one puts RLUSD, Ripple’s dollar stablecoin, somewhere it wasn’t before.
The day before, Ripple got final approval from the OCC to set up a national trust bank. That bank will hold RLUSD’s reserves and offer digital asset custody, while issuing the stablecoin stays with Ripple’s New York-regulated company. The timing wasn’t an accident.
Robinhood takes RLUSD into the brokerage
RLUSD is coming to Robinhood’s retail and institutional businesses, with integrations for treasury management, lending and trading. It’s already live on Robinhood Chain and on Bitstamp by Robinhood. A launch inside the main Robinhood app is planned for later this year. Robinhood reported 28.6 million funded customers as of August.
Robinhood also plans to use RLUSD on the XRP Ledger for institutional settlement, and it will run its own global cash management on Ripple Treasury. Ripple Prime, the prime brokerage Ripple bought, expands its financing for Bitstamp, which plans to launch perpetual futures later this year.
BNY adds XRP and RLUSD custody
BNY’s digital asset custody platform now holds XRP and RLUSD for eligible institutional clients. BNY was already the main reserve custodian for RLUSD. The two companies are now working on letting BNY clients mint and redeem RLUSD directly through the bank, and on support for tokenized assets issued on the XRP Ledger, trade finance included. No dates yet.
C2FO moves invoice payments onto the ledger
C2FO, which says its early payment programs have moved more than $250 billion in working capital, is bringing its Instant Pay service onto the XRP Ledger. Capital providers would fund approved invoices and settle in RLUSD in a few seconds, while suppliers keep using C2FO’s marketplace as before and invoice terms stay unchanged. It’s in testing, with a controlled launch and first RLUSD transactions expected by year end.
What adds up
RLUSD launched in December 2024. Its market value is around $2.5 billion, with about $1 billion of that issued on the XRP Ledger. That’s small next to the largest dollar stablecoins.
Taken one by one, these are pilots and integrations. Together they show the strategy. Ripple wants RLUSD sitting inside regulated institutions: a broker with tens of millions of accounts, a bank that custodies trillions, a trade finance platform that funds real invoices. Distribution is what a stablecoin needs, and Ripple bought a lot of it in one day.
The C2FO piece is the one to watch. Trade finance is slow, paper heavy and expensive for small suppliers. If invoices really settle in seconds on a public ledger, that’s a use case that doesn’t depend on crypto prices at all.